How secure is your job? Health care, computers shape up as best fields

Monday

Sep 3, 2012 at 12:01 AMSep 3, 2012 at 3:11 AM

In the coming decade, the computer and health care fields are expected to do best. The manufacturing, media and agriculture sectors are expected to continue to shed jobs.

Christian Schiavone

If you care for the sick or elderly, design computer systems or build bridges, roads or houses, your job is probably secure.

If you work for a factory, a utility company, the post office or a newspaper, you might want to consider a career change.

The best-paying jobs through 2020 will go to people with master’s degrees, nursing degrees, technical or trade skills, a report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows. Gone are the days when blue collar workers with high school educations could support a family by standing all day at the assembly line. The assembly line, once a bulwark of middle-class employment, isn’t there.

Manufacturing jobs will continue to decline sharply, the report says. Job growth in media, farming, fishing and business management will be stagnant.

New jobs will result from an increased need for nurses and home health aides to care for an aging population, designers and technicians to create and maintain new technology and workers to fuel an anticipated boom in construction.

Economists say there will be opportunities for jobs that cannot easily be shipped to places like Asia, where cheaper labor continues to draw manufacturing.

“It’s really hard to find someone in another country to clean my house or repair my car,” said Professor Kevin Lang, a labor economist at Boston University. “It’s very hard to find someone to do litigation on your behalf in another country. ... Home health care aides aren’t easily replaced by computers.”

Health care jobs, especially nursing and home care aides, are expected to account for 28 percent of all new jobs – about 5.7 million of them – created nationwide from 2010 to 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In towns south of Quincy, the number of personal and home care aide jobs and home health aide jobs are expected to increase by more than 40 percent by 2018, according to the state Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development.

A boom in construction is also expected to create 1.8 million jobs nationwide, including more than 7,000 in the Boston-Cambridge-Quincy area, according to the projections.

Still, those jobs aren’t expected to completely make up for the beating the construction sector took in the recession that started in 2008, and construction jobs in towns south of Quincy are expected to decline by about 2,600 positions.

Frank Callahan, president of the Massachusetts Building Trades Council, based in Dorchester, said he is seeing signs of an upswing and that the council is looking to increase enrollment in its apprenticeship courses.

“We’re starting to see things turn in Massachusetts,” he said. “It’s still nowhere near where it was five years ago, but you’re certainly starting to see a lot of cranes going up, and not just in Boston and Cambridge.”

Upcoming infrastructure projects, including the construction of a new Fore River Bridge between Weymouth and Quincy, will help kick start job growth, Callahan said.

Professional, scientific and technical services jobs – including computer system design and maintenance – are expected to increase by 29 percent, or nearly 2.1 million jobs, nationwide by 2020.

But jobs for postal workers, print journalists and agricultural workers are all expected to decline.

Professor Jon Bryan, who teaches courses on global labor and employment relations at Bridgewater State University, said the loss of manufacturing jobs has taken away a chunk of largely good paying jobs from the economy. And while more jobs are being created in retail and food service, they come with significantly lower wages.

“You’re seeing at the same time a relatively large number of jobs in the lower tier,” he said. “That’s good because there are jobs, but on the other hand, it’s not all good because they may have difficulty aspiring to be part of the American middle class.”

But that doesn’t mean there’s no hope for good paying, middle-class jobs, said Paul Bachman, director of research at Suffolk University’ Beacon Hill Institute.

With new innovation will come specialized jobs required to build, repair and maintain new technology, Bachman said. The trouble is figuring out what sector those advances will be in.

“The big take away is that no one really has any idea where the next jobs will come from,” he said. “You just don’t know where the next big innovation is going to come. That’s the fun of it.”